Swell is a simple and less powerful version of popular configuration management tools like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and Salt. The goal of Swell is to make it really easy to ensure that machines meet certain criteria (such as having installed and up-to-date software running on them, latest versions of configuration files, etc).
When possible, Swell uses prexisting solutions to simply it's own job. In fact, all it's really doing on it's own is calling a bunch of scripts that are grouped by administrators into "profiles", a concept familiar to the other systems above. In Swell, a profile is simply a directory.
Swell likely won't be adequate for complex setups, but should be far simpler to deploy on simpler setups than existing tools.
Swell executed scripts that are arranged into profiles (directories), so the first thing you need to do is to create a directory to house our profiles.
mkdir profiles
cd profiles
Edit your ProfilePath in swell.conf to point to the new directory.
Then create one subdirectory for each profile. Good profiles will capture "packages" of
configurations for end systems; for example webserver and mongodb are potentially
useful profiles.
mkdir webserver
mkdir mongodb
Within each directory, add some scripts that should be run for each profile. Note that scripts should be idempotent since Swell does not try to get fancy around tracking client state. This means you may want to condition your scripts on certain outcomes (for example, don't restart Apache unless something happened that'd make you need to restart Apache, like downloading a new configuration).
After you've added scripts, there are two steps remaining: make the profiles directory accessible
to each client machine (network mounts, FTP, wget, etc) and configure some sort of trigger to
invoke swell. I usually use cron, but many different utilities are available for triggering on
events other than time if desired. Run Swell with the profiles that the machine should apply and
Swell will ensure that all scripts are run.
swell webserver mongodb
And you're done!
Precompiled packages are available for Ubuntu-like distributions at https://packagecloud.io/anyweez/public and can be installed via apt-get.